EMV hits nearly 30% of global card-present transactions

Contact-based EMV global adoption 2014
ALL OVER: Contact-based EMV global adoption in 2014. Click to enlarge.

Almost 30% of all card-present transactions conducted globally between July 2013 and June 2014 used the EMV chip card standard, EMVCo has revealed, with the highest usage in Western Europe and the lowest in the United States.

Europe Zone 1 (broadly Western Europe) led the field with more than 96% of transactions being EMV standard, followed by Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean (over 83%) and Africa and the Middle East at 76%.

Europe Zone 2 (broadly the CIS states) and Asia are in the process of adopting EMV chip technology and had transaction volumes of over 50% and 19% respectively, says the standards body. The US, currently in the process of migrating to EMV, showed just 0.03% of its transactions as being EMV chip-based.

The data represents both contact and contactless transactions processed by American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, UnionPay and Visa.

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